The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors.

Early advertisers on the network include Honda, Acura, Toyota, t-mobile, Adobe, HP, Sandisk, MSFT, Verizon, Sun, Sony, Visa, Nike, Scion, Chevrolet, Paramount, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Best Buy.

Technorati has explored selling ads for third party sites for some time, but this is the first time they’ve opened the service up to anyone. Unlike Glam and Federated Media, they will take all comers, and say they expect blogs, from the large players on down through the long tail, will find they do a better job monetizing sites than the current options.—Technorati Launches Blog Ad Network, Technorati Media

Will this work?  Bringing decent monetization to the masses has been the dream of many in the ad business, including me during my days at Qumana, and well it’s harder than it looks.

A lot harder.

The key is not only CPM, but inventory.  Good inventory.  Inventory that is better than what we see through other programs.

Technorati has a built in advantage over a lot of upstarts because it knows which blogs might be good targets to sell ads to both in terms of traffic and content.

I guess this is the play Technorati has been working up to for a long time.  Take the massive about of blog data, links, tags, “authority”, etc and mine it for advertisers.

Is that what we signed on for?  Is this what David Sifry had in mind?

If this is all as Techcrunch reports, then it looks like claiming your blog on Technorati is the first step in being in their ad network.

This troubles me, yeah that might be the value add, but what about the other stuff?  Is that going to fall by the wayside?

I think time and the morning will tell.  Right now, I’m just glad I stated up late tonight ;-).

Post from: EveryJoe

Technorati Media launches to bring better monetization to blogs